


my true love gave to me

by dontbitethesun



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Christmas, Holiday, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-01
Updated: 2011-12-01
Packaged: 2017-10-26 18:24:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/286489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dontbitethesun/pseuds/dontbitethesun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Twelve days before Christmas, Dean starts receiving rather unusual, unexpected gifts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	my true love gave to me

**Author's Note:**

> Set in the current season, so it's a little bittersweet but it does have a happy ending, cross my heart. 'Tis the season, after all. :)

Between the trouble with the Leviathans and Dean's brooding about all he's lost (Cas and Lisa most recently, but so much more before them too), December and the holiday season kind of sneak up on him.

He gets his first inkling that Christmas is approaching when Sam shows up with a weirdly colored cake-like thing shaped like a loaf of bread two weeks before Christmas. "What the hell is that?" Dean demands.

"It's a fruitcake." He sounds a little too gleeful about that answer.

"Fruitcake? You were supposed to get me pie."

"This is so much better," Sam teases.

Dean, being Dean, eats the fruitcake anyway. Or part of it at least. It's not very good.

*

Two days later, Dean asks, "Have you seen my socks? I can't find any more clean pairs in my bag."

"No, Dean," Sam tersely replies, "that's what laundry is for."

Sam's bag is already neatly packed and sitting by the motel room door. Dean eyes it thoughtfully. "Don't even think about it," Sam snaps. He refuses to share his socks on the grounds that if he gives Dean a single pair, Dean will never do his own laundry again and steal all of Sam's instead.

Dean frowns and starts looking again, carelessly tossing motel blankets out of the way on his hunt for his very last clean pair of socks, and that's when he finds it. There, sitting innocently on the bed near his pillow in a spot where Dean is fairly certain he had already looked not five minutes before is a pair of white socks folded neatly together. He gives them a cautious sniff and sure enough, they're clean.

"Hah," Dean says, sitting down to put them on. "I knew I had one pair left."

Sam snorts. Dean glances up at him.

"You didn't hide them, did you?" he asks.

Sam shoots him a look like maybe their mother dropped him on his head when he was a small child. "Why," he asks, "in the hell would _I_ steal _your_ socks?"

Point, Dean thinks, and resolves to be thankful for this serendipitous find, at least until he forgets about it ten minutes later when Sam _takes the map of Arkansas_ right out of his hands and tries to tell him they're going the wrong way if they want to hit that hunt in Little Rock.

(It turns out he's right, the bastard. Dean just hasn't been himself the past few months and his sense of direction is apparently suffering as a result.)

*

The next time it happens - or rather the next time Dean notices - it's a little more obvious, a little less coincidental.

The hunt in Little Rock turns out to be a typical salt and burn. Typical in that what should be easy turns out to be far, far more complicated. Their ghost’s bones are buried on private property, in a location that’s pretty hard to get to up on a hilltop overlooking a wide pond. His death hadn’t been anything sinister, just a young man who'd died too young and turned bitter about it.

After he and Sam had finally located and dug up the coffin, the ghost showed up to stop them from ending his post-death killing spree.

Sam is doing his best to keep the ghost occupied while Dean douses the bones with igniter fluid, but the ghost goes for Dean just as he's about to light them up. The hit catches him off guard and knocks him down. And what does Dean do? _He drops his freaking lighter._ Not in the grave, and certainly not lit, but down the hill and almost certainly into the fucking pond. He's pretty sure he hears a distinct splash.

Dean barrels down the hill after it and drops to his knees at the base of the rather large body of water. The lighter could have gone anywhere in there and it's far to dark for him to see where it landed.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck," he chants, hands sifting through the water in a useless search. He can't see the gleam of metal anywhere in the inky black shallows. Why doesn't he ever carry a spare?

"Little help, Dean?" Sam calls from the top of the hill.

"I'm working on it!" Dean shouts back.

His toe, still on dry land, knocks against something solid. At first he thinks it's just a rock, but something makes him turn around and look. It's his lighter, shining in the moonlight without a single drop of water on it.

"Oh thank god," Dean gasps, picking it up and racing back up the hill.

The ghost goes down in a flare of flame and Dean bends over, his hands resting on his knees as he tries to catch his breath.

"I'm getting too old for this," he grouses.

Sam comes up and slaps him on the back, a little harder than necessary. Dean absolutely does not stumble. Sam grins. "You did good, old man," he says.

"Never call me that again," Dean demands and tries not to spare another thought for the lighter. Obviously, he just got lucky. Obviously.

*

The next day, he finds an extra pie in his Mickey D's bag after he and Sam pull through the drive through. It's cherry, his favorite kind. The kind the kid at the microphone had most definitely told him they were out of when he'd ordered. Dean remembers, he’d asked twice.

Three days after that, there’s a cheeseburger from Dean’s favorite diner waiting in the car. A cheeseburger from a diner in another state entirely that had _been shut down two years ago._

Dean mentions to Sam how weird he thinks all the things he's been finding are. He’s not about to pass up a perfectly good burger, so he eats it anyway. It’s like that saying about gift horses and mouths, however it goes.

Sam thinks he knows exactly what's going on and he explains: Dean is getting presents for the twelve days of Christmas.

“You think?” Dean asks as he licks sauce from his fingers, not entirely convinced.

“That gun with the silver bullet on our last hunt was really too convenient for this to be a coincidence.”

“Huh,” Dean muses. “Who's doing it, do you think?”

Sam just shakes his head pityingly and looks at him like he's stupid. It’s a look he’s been getting a lot from his little brother, actually. At least it means he’s had a lot of time to get used to it.

*

Some of the gifts are random and useless and make no sense. If he didn't know better (that there was no way these gifts could be coming from who Sam thinks they're coming from because that person-angel, whatever, is _dead_ ), he'd think someone had their celestial wires crossed.

"What the hell am I going to do with a tenth grade trigonometry textbook?"

Sam ends up reading it when they get stopped by a train after stopping for lunch somewhere in Oklahoma, so Dean supposes he can't exactly call it useless.

*

On the twelfth day of Christmas, Dean finds a cell phone sitting on his bed. It looks oddly familiar.

As he's contemplating it, it rings. He answers.

"Cas?" he says, knowing who it is deep in his soul before he ever hears the voice on the other end. He's not wrong.

"Hello Dean," Cas says.


End file.
